The Monster's Clock of Hope

Wright uses another symbol to plant this, a giant billboard tabooside larger's window that reminds him you can't win. on that point is no hope for Bigger because despite any qualification he might have for success, he lives in an surround that never gives him a chance. In fact, Bigger is most much viewed as a "monster" by whites, something typical of the manipulation of African Americans in a racial society. In his recap of the novel, James Smethurst contends that Wright has created a gothic- homogeneous atmosphere in which Bigger is perceived as a monster: "The thousand of police officers with flashlights and searchlights who observe Bigger through an urban gothic landscape of devoted tenements on the South Side?closely resemble the villagers with torches who bob Frankenstein through an expressionist landscape" (31).

In such an environment, it is un mark offlable for Bigger to find any sense of community. The environment in which Bigger must mature is one fillight-emitting diode with rats, miss water, where food is sc atomic number 18d and money even scarcer. Dominant others in society continually reinforce the image that African Americans like Bigger atomic number 18 worthless, without dignity, and wholly lacking in intelligence activity or creativity. Bigger's mother finds solace in religion which Bigger cannot adhere to. This is so much willful self-blinding to Bigger who cannot visualize why African Americans do not strike out a readyst t

Describing poor urban blacken life during the Great Depression of the 1930s, Richard Wright's best-selling novel natural Son (1940) depicts Chicago as a site of extreme point racial and political violence. Coup lead with severe frugal uncomfortableness as a result of the stock market break apart of 1929, the world of Wright's protagonist, Bigger Thomas, was largely indicative of white America's racist and social Darwinist disregard for black homo. Indeed, as literary historiographer Stephen Michael Best has argued, "[o]ne could interpret causally the relation between declining economic conditions and white terroristic violence, suggesting that the former increased idleness and irritability and led ultimately to the latter" (114).

For many young urban blacks in northern ghettos of the 1930s, Bigger's rage was an understandable, if not identifiable, response to white racism and poverty.

Winter, Kari J. Subjects of Slavery, Agents of Change: Women and Power in Gothic Novels and Slave Narratives, 1790-1865. capital of Greece: U of Georgia P, 1992.

But how, then, are we to account for Bigger's humanity if not by looking (as Butler has done) to Bigger's acts of kindness? How are we to make sense of his humanity given the particularly dehumanizing context of use in which Bigger finds himself? Are Bigger's defiantly oppositional behaviors and violence alone the internalization of a history of hate and injury that has led to an absence of his humanity? Or might one read Bigger's actions as nothing less than "emancipatory" in his attempt to overturn the social and political order of white supremacy and control? But what if the situation is more complicated than this? Certainly, Bigger's defiantly oppositional behaviors and practices are destructive at times, particularly in his brutal treatment of his girlfriend, Bessie. But do not Bigger's violent behaviors also produce the very expression through which he is able to gain consciousness, restore his self-respect, and assert his humanity? How are we to account for
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